


The Hollow Book

by GrandAdmiralJek



Category: Original Work
Genre: Adventure, Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 09:59:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17384369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrandAdmiralJek/pseuds/GrandAdmiralJek
Summary: Daniel takes a job to clean the library of a mysterious old man's mansion. The man has only one rule: don't touch the book on the pedestal. But what is so special about the book? Why does it lack a title? And what power does it wield?





	The Hollow Book

**“Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.” –Author Unknown**  

The library was old and smelled musty, and dust that had long ago settled blanketed much of the furniture. Ornate paintings and antique artifacts adorned the walls, and the centerpiece of the large oak table was the carved ivory head of a leering dragon, teeth made of jade, eyes some dull, unrecognizable gems. The shelves, old, strong wood, lined the walls from front to back, and a spiral staircase towards the back of the room led to a second floor.

Books. All of them. Top to bottom, filled to the brim, overflowing with literature. There had to be thousands of books on the first floor alone, yet they somehow managed to be packed in a neat, orderly fashion, no one shelf to tightly stocked. Most of the books wore old and weathered leather covers, and an occasional marker was set to show where one section ended and another began.

Daniel took all of this in, and sighed. It was the exact opposite of where he wanted to be right now. His neighbor, whose name he had never managed to catch, had come up to him and offered him an above average amount of money to come in every few days and dust, keep the library clean and fresh. He wouldn’t have given it a second thought, except that he was just a few hundred dollars short of the price of the new car he was eyeing, and he wanted to impress Stephanie next month at the Fall Formal.

So he had begrudgingly accepted the offer, and now he looked around, rag in hand, at the immense job he had ahead of him. He remembered the instructions the old man had left for him.

 _“You can stay as long as you like,”_ he had said, his white beard hiding his smile, _“and feel free to look for a book, if you’re interested. Just make sure that the place is clean when you leave. Oh, and don’t touch that one book over in the corner, on the wooden pedestal. It is very brittle.”_

He walked over and looked down at the book on its pedestal. It was probably the oldest book in the library, and yet, strangely, it lacked a title, or a cover. It seemed to be so delicate that just picking it up would cause it to crumble to dust.

Turning away from the book, he scowled, and looked about the library, then down at the rag he clutched in his hand. He had a long, hard job ahead of him, so he might as well get started.

* * *

 

After about an hour, Daniel finally wiped his brow and looked on in satisfaction. The dust had been cleared, leaving the surfaces looking glossed and shiny. The dragon’s dull eyes now glittered in the light of the crystal chandelier, and, if possible, the room seemed brighter now that the dust had been cleared.

He walked around the library, spying some names on the spines of the books he recalled from his English classes: Dickens on this shelf, Bradbury on that, Alcott in this corner. He wasn’t the biggest fan of reading, but he had to admit; the old man’s collection was quite an accomplishment.

He walked past the corner with the pedestal, and was about to turn away, when he stopped, confused. He thought he had caught a flash of color. He turned back to the book. Yes, there was something on the cover of the book.

He edged closer, back to the wooden pedestal, and looked on. There, on the cover of what had been a blank leather canvas, was a small, black picture. He looked closer. It was a strange shape, almost undefinable, until he looked at the book sideways and recognized what the black ink was. It was a whale. Beneath the whale, written in the same black ink, were the words _Moby Dick._

He had heard that name somewhere before, probably another English class, but couldn’t remember what had happened in the story. Only that it was about a man on a ship, hunting whales.

He looked around, but he was still alone in the library. The old man hadn’t appeared from his study since Daniel had arrived at the house.

Cautiously, he extended a hand and placed it on the cover. It was rough material, with a smooth spot where the whale was drawn onto the cover. He slipped a hand under the seam between the cover and the pages, and lifted it. Underneath, the front page read simply, _Moby Dick._ Beneath the title, the words _by Herman Melville_ stuck out on the page. He again looked around, as if he was violating some law of the library and the dragon’s glittering eyes would see him and catch him in the act. He turned the next page, and was met by even more confusion. Beneath the title page, there was nothing. The middle of all the pages beneath it were cut out, where the words would have been. The rest of the paper was still there, giving the hollow text the appearance of a full book, when in reality, an empty rectangle occupied the space beneath the cover.

Still feeling confused and uncertain that his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him, Daniel turned away from the book to the door. His eyes widened in horror as he watched what he could only describe as a tidal wave of water flood into the library at lightning speed. It gushed as if from a giant tap, not even slowing down as the library was filled halfway in a matter of seconds.

Daniel struggled to keep himself afloat as the water began rising, soaking the precious books, flowing over antique paintings and ornate carvings. Soon, he was up to the ceiling, and he felt the water pressing against him as it drew closer and closer to extinguishing what little air was left at the top of the room. Finally, he took one final deep breath as the water closed over the air, trapping him.

However, as soon as the water reached the ceiling, something even stranger happened. One moment, he was pressed against the ceiling, desperately searching for any last pockets of air. Then, out of nowhere, it felt as if the ceiling had dropped out from underneath him. It just disappeared: here one moment, gone the next. Now, there was only open water above him, and as he looked up, he saw a bright white light above the surface that he believed was the sun.

Lungs crying for air, he clawed his way to the surface, breaking through the water and taking several deep breaths mixed with coughs from the saltwater he had inhaled.

 _“Wait!”_ he thought, looking around. _“Salt water?”_

Gazing around himself, he found that he was indeed in the middle of what seemed to be the ocean, crystal clear, blue water surrounding him as far as the eye could see. He could see here and there beneath the waves fish that darted about in blurs of color between his legs as he treaded water. There was no land that he could see for miles. His head went under and he inhaled a gulp of the seawater. He gagged, spitting out the salt and coughing as his lungs burned from the sensation. The salt stung his eyes and blurred his vision as he looked around. He had to be far out in the middle of the ocean, because there was no land to be seen for miles around, and the water beneath him trickled into deep blue, the ocean floor far below unseen.

“Stay calm,” he told himself aloud, “stay calm. How did this happen? Where am I?”

Suddenly, he heard something behind him. He turned, and stared. How could he have missed it? There, not a mile away from him, was a large wooden ship, its bow pointed toward him. He began to wave and shout, but before he could raise his voice, he heard a voice calling from the vessel. The gruff shout of an old man

“Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?” came the voice over the quiet waters. "Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd jet that way, and then disappears."

 _“What?”_ wondered Daniel. _“Who are they? What are they looking for?”_ Then, he remembered what he had seen on the cover of the hollow book. It had been _Moby Dick_ , the name of the whale that the crew hunted in the story.

Daniel was having trouble processing all of the information at once, when all of a sudden, from beneath him, he felt an explosion of power and force that drove him several hundred feet into the air and left him gasping. He looked down to see one of the largest whales he had ever seen in his life. It was massive, its giant head like a battering ram, and its skin bright white in the early morning sun. Its snout trailed behind it several flailing things that looked like string, and then he realized they were harpoons stuck into the whale’s flesh and broken off from their ships.

The giant creature dropped out from beneath him, and without its massive presence forcing him upward, he felt himself lose his upward momentum. As he hung there in the air, motionless for a split second, he looked down and saw the behemoth’s tail disappearing in an explosion of foam beneath the waves, the water rippling outward from the point of impact. The men on the ship could be heard yelling, "There she breaches! There she breaches!" and with that, Daniel felt gravity take an effect again, and he began to fall.

He let out a scream of terror as the water rush up to meet him, the wind rushing in his ears, and he could only close his eyes and await the cold, sudden slap that would come. He opened one eye a crack, saw the water mere feet away, felt the sting that would end his life-

And promptly, he awoke. He snapped his head back and fell over backward in a chair he didn’t remember sitting down in, gasping wide-eyed, feeling himself all around to check for injuries. There were none, and as he looked around and regained his senses, he was startled to find himself back in the library, the shelves still arranged neatly, the books stacked in order. Nothing indicated the giant flood of water that had overtaken the room. Every speck of dust was still gone from his cleaning, and his watch indicated that little time had passed since the water had begun flowing.

The sound of a throat clearing startled him yet again, and he jerked away from the unexpected sound instinctively. The old man towered over him and the chair on its back, eyes glittering intently as he studied the boy. Daniel felt explanations and questions clamoring for his attention, but, as if knowing they were coming, the old man held up a hand to ward them off. Then, finally, Daniel saw the glint of white teeth underneath the long beard, and knew the man was smiling.

In a kind voice, with that coy grin plastered to his face, the old man bent to offer a hand to Daniel, and spoke.

“Getting into a good book, were we?”

* * *

 

“It’s something I’ve never been able to completely explain,” said the old man, sipping quietly at his cup as he sat cross-legged behind his desk in the study. Daniel had a cup as well, though the hot chocolate inside had long since cooled. He wasn’t very thirsty at the moment.

“I inherited that book from my grandfather when he passed away many years ago. He said in his will it was a book of adventure, of excitement, and it would bring me as much joy as it had him in his long life. I was an avid reader, though I didn’t have nearly as extensive a collection as I do now, and so, the prospect intrigued me. Imagine my surprise when I opened it the first time and discovered, as you no doubt did, that it was hollow. My first trip took me to England, and I watched as a short scene of Charles Dickens’s _Oliver Twist_ played out before my eyes. Then, I was mugged by one of the ruffians, and I discovered one of the cardinal rules of this book: If you died in the story, it transported you back to reality.”

“That’s why I woke up so suddenly,” Daniel said quietly. “I would have been dead if that had been real. But… I have a question.”

The old man waited, sipping his drink.

“Why did I appear, or whatever happened to get me into the story, when I did? Because I haven’t read _Moby Dick_ since the 10th grade, but I know that that wasn’t the beginning of the book.”

“It is one of the mysteries I have been unable to solve about the book. As I became more and more practiced in my handling of the book, I began to be able to control when in the story I would appear. I had to find a book in my collection and have it open to the beginning, or to whichever part of the story I wished to go; otherwise, the trip would be to a random part of a random story. But as long as I did that, I could decide beforehand where I was going, and it would always camouflage me to blend in with that time period. You may not have noticed in your panic, but you probably were wearing clothes reminiscent of an 19th century sailor.”

He sighed, and set his cup back on the table.

“One thing I never have been able to control is what story I go to if I didn’t choose a book from my shelves. I always had to have the book myself, or the journey was random. It seems to change from day to day, the book selecting whatever story it decides on. It never chooses stories that are never worth reading, and I have discovered many a good, yet little-known book, through it.”

“Sir, if I may,” Daniel began. He cleared his throat, unsure of his words. “Why did you tell me to leave it alone if it had such power?”

“Well, if some crazy old man came to you with stories of a book that transport you into any story you wanted came along and offered you a job, you wouldn’t be inclined to accept, now would you?”

Daniel sat back, shaking his head slowly.

“I didn’t know whether or not you would end up opening the book, and I was pleasantly surprised when you did. You are the first person I have shared this secret with, young man, and that is not to be taken lightly. I have studied you for a while now, and I recognize that beneath all of your high school bravado that you do have an intelligent brain in that head of yours. So, I’m going to offer you something.

“I am tired and old; I haven’t used the book in over two months, hence the dust in the library. After using it, regular books just don’t hold the same appeal anymore. I’ve had many adventures with this book, but I’ve reached an age where it’s much too stressful to go in anymore. At least, by myself.”

Daniel sat up a bit straighter. “What are you saying?”

“Well, my library gets dusty rather quickly, and I wouldn’t mind giving you an ongoing job with me. If you’re interested, that is.”

Daniel pondered for a moment, then he extended his hand to the old man, a smile forming on his lips. “I’m in.”

“Well, then, young Daniel, welcome to my world.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> This work was my first short story and was inspired in part by the Magic Treehouse series from my childhood, in which two siblings find a treehouse in the woods filled with books and can travel to the worlds within the books. Please, if you have a younger sibling or a kid, I recommend the series; it's fantastic for young readers.


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